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  • Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance ed. by Les Roberts
  • Geoff Edwards
Mapping Cultures: Place, Practice, Performance / Ed. Les Roberts. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Pp. 328; illus. (12 figs., 32 maps); 5.43 × 8.5″. ISBN 9780230301139 (cloth), £55.00, US$90.00. Available from http://us.macmillan.com/ or http://international.macmillan.com/

Mapping Cultures presents itself as nothing much. The title requires some unpacking; the subtitle is generic. The cover, if we are to judge the book by it, seems to be an incoherent photo-dump from somebody’s London wanderings. All of the book’s 45 images – photographs, maps, cover image, and all – are given to us in black and white. I could go on.

But not much more.

Because in his wide-ranging (and entertaining) introduction, Les Roberts makes clear that the project of Mapping Cultures is anything but nothing much. He and the book’s 14 contributors aim “to set out a spatial anthropology of mapping cultures and to re-evaluate the place of maps and mapping in cultural studies and theory more generally” (p. 11). As for the title: it cleverly blends two modes of mapping at work in the world – on the one hand, how cultures of mapping organize cartographic knowledge; and, on the other, how we extend mapping practices to organize our knowledge of culture and cultures.

The photo-dump cover, it turns out, is Sohei Nishino’s Diorama Map London (2010), assembled from thousands of photographs gleaned by the artist during walks around London – a selection of innumerable facets from a continuously enacted city. Roberts expands on the functions and roles performed by Nishino’s map: iconography, ethnography, psychogeography, mnemonic device, pedagogical tool, marketing emblem, status symbol, and so on. The map’s restlessness suggests something of London’s.

And the metaphors of mapping, having found steady employment across the academic disciplines, are similarly restless – perhaps more so. The point here, however, is not to tame the restless map or its correlative mapping cultures (cultures of mapping) but, rather, to steer this restlessness toward enriching “the democratization and cultures of our everyday lives and social spaces” (p. 22). Or, as Denis Wood writes in the final chapter, we must try to “reclaim the map as something truly human” (p. 300).

Roberts has organized the book into three parts: place, text, and topography; performance, memory, location; and practice, apparatus, cartographics. The 15 chapters represent a broad range of fields, many of which have only recently become engaged not only with mapping but with the critical evaluation of its practices. In his introductory chapter, Roberts observes that “there is so much more to say about mapping than is often said in cartographic circles” (p. 12). To that end, he has assembled a collection of works variously associated with anthropology, [End Page 149] architecture, critical cartography, digital media and technology studies, ethnomusicology, film studies, place-marketing, and others.

Mapping Cultures offers a collection of innovative studies and theoretical essays, each confronting the diffusion of cartographic method and rhetoric throughout humanities and social science research over the past two decades. Despite the book’s transdisciplinary breadth, the focus here is squarely on the urban: nearly every chapter somehow engages with the performance of urban place.

For geographers, Mapping Cultures contains several essays that consider how maps and mapping practices serve as methodological instruments and analytic tools alike, enabling researchers to engage with the dynamic interplay of social life and the landscape. The practice of mapping often forces (frees?) the researcher to confront her own situation within this interplay: as Hazel Andrews realizes, her ethnographic fieldwork and mappings of Mallorca themselves perform the island. Sarah Cohen, in her chapter on the musical landscape(s) of Liverpool, similarly considers how her use of mapping practices (specifically, maps of the city drawn by musicians themselves) feeds back into her understanding of the evolving relationship between the performance of music and the performance of place.

For humanities scholars, the book offers some insight into the proper care and feeding of mapping vocabularies and metaphors. In the opening chapter of the first section, for instance, David Cooper analyzes the “textual spaces” of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s notebooks. Cooper calls...

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